The endurance figures seem to suggest anywhere between 6.6k and 11k cycles, which is both a wide range and unusually high for TLC flash - this is the normally expected range for decent MLC and 5 years of retention, so I suspect they're massaging the retention downwards to get those numbers.
On the other hand, an enterprise drive like Kioxia CM7 will offer either 1 or 3 drive writes per day (for regular and write-intensive drive models, respectively), across the 5 year warranty. That's ~1800 cycles or just shy of 5500 cycles.
ggm•2h ago
Prices for HDD do drop when the TB available rises but there seems to be a "floor" price.
For SSD, there definitely appears to be a floor price.
I am pretty convinced this is not cost btw. This is classic cost/price disjoint stuff.
The price is tracking people's willingness to pay.
wmf•2h ago
dopa42365•2h ago
ggm•1h ago
esseph•48m ago
ggm•2h ago
We're not even tracking the chipcost for the storage. There's no linear function between them in terms of numbers, or die space.
The price is just "the price"
elchananHaas•2h ago
Flash storage is a commodity, we are paying close to the amortized cost of manufactured and sales.
ggm•1h ago
"A few dollars" forsooth. My 2TB SSD cost $150 AUD and was (I believe) immensely profitable to everyone down the supply chain. The same spend gets you 16GB of packaged DDR ram and I think we can both see there is no linear relationship between the DDR chip cost, in GB and the 100x denser storage needed for SLC flash. This is not about vlsi density or number of chips. I'm not paying $15,000 more for my SSD.
"The prices are the prices"
Dylan16807•2h ago
Baseline name brand SSDs got down to about $75 for 2TB, and I'm not going to be impressed by anything until I see similar numbers again.
adastra22•2h ago
Dylan16807•2h ago
And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products.
radicality•2h ago
And versus the normal M2 drives, the larger server grade are more annoying. For example, I got recently a 15.36TB Kioxia Cd6-R in U.3 format, for $1.3k, which is not bad for ssd prices. After getting the right adapters and fitting it inside a minisforum ms-01. It’s working fine, but it immediately reached its “critical” temperature (while doing nothing) so I had to attach a big fan and cool it. All the larger SSDs which are meant for server rooms will expect lots of cooling.
https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/PCI-E4.0/15.36TB/KIOXIA/KCD...
adastra22•1h ago
LtdJorge•54m ago
abdullahkhalids•2h ago
As there are many consumer level producers (who all buy from a smaller set of actual producers), it may seem like the market is close to perfect competition (which would justify price=cost).
But actually there are many low quality producers that frequently burn those stupid enough to buy from them. And a few high quality producers who generally sell what they advertise. So if you are trying to buy a high quality SSD, you are buying from an oligopoly that have built their brands over the years. So they can charge significantly higher than cost due to this reason.
And I imagine that others can't drop their prices much lower than this price because then people get suspicious and don't buy it at all.
ggm•1h ago
Not close, but closeER and at least some evidence of tracking. That's what I'd expect if they were ubiquitous.
Some goods track commodity prices closely. Shrinkflation happens when you can't easily alter the unit price, chocolate bars are a good example. Not that we pay anything like as little as the producers get: there's enough competition that putting valhrona to one side, chocolate prices reflect commodity prices. Same with fuel. Same with ROHC compliant resistors. SMD components. PCBs. Batteries, led light bulbs. DDR memory.
Not SSD. There is no reason it must, this isn't the laws of physics. I just observe it doesn't. If there was more visible competition in supply of inputs, they MIGHT. But it looks like at best a duopoly or tri-opoly of inputs, and prices reflect demand a lot more. Supply isn't even close to demand, there's no surplus.
Those other things are somewhat peripheral. Not saying they don't have a role, but I don't think it's fundamental. I bought 6 "patriot" P210 and they get average to poor reviews for speed and reliability.
lazide•1h ago
kijin•1h ago
Professionals like us know of course that the SSD is an easily upgradable component. But we also tend to know how to set up a NAS with 4x 18TB HDDs in a zfs pool that can saturate the bandwidth of any reasonable home network when transferring large files. So the market for professionals and enthusiasts don't always translate into a market for large SSDs.